Using Pushups to Build Muscle and Strength

Do you remember those exercises they made you do in school? They sucked right? You were struggling to push all 100lbs of you up off the floor, but here you are thinking you need heavy weight to build muscle. Chances are you’ve become a heavy weight yourself since your schooldays, but that’s not the only reason why you can use pushups to build muscle.

What Muscles do Pushups work?

Just in case you’ve forgotten, I’ll give you a reminder. The pushup is a simple exercise. You get down on all fours, lower your chest to the floor and push yourself back up.

There are many different variations of the standard pushup, and each has its own benefit and can find it’s way into your training program.

Generally we like to think that the pushup is a chest exercise, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The pushup is a full body movement. The pushup works:

• The chest- the major muscles involved in the movement are pectoralis major and pectoralis minor which move the arm at the shoulder.
• The triceps- this is the major muscle responsible for extending the arm at the elbow during a pushup.
• The shoulder- the deltoid muscles work with the chest muscles to move at the shoulder joint.
• Serratus anterior- this muscle is responsible for protracting the scapula during the pushup movement.
• The biceps and back muscles, such as the latissimus dorsi, rhomboids, and trapezius muscles, act as antagonists and stabilize the active joints during the pushup.
• The abdominal muscles, glutes and legs keep the body straight during the pushup.

With all these muscles involved, there must be some way for pushups to build muscle.

How to Build Muscle and Strength with Pushups

In the gym it’s easy, you start to pack more weight onto the barbell and you know you’re going to get bigger and stronger from it. However, it’s difficult to visualize how you’re going to use pushups to build muscle and strength.

It’s not like you can just increase your bodyweight to increase the resistance. I mean you can, but before you start shoveling ice-cream in your mouth let’s consider a few things.

How to Start Building Muscle with Pushups

Before you begin you’ll need to figure out what kind of pushups you’ll want to include in your training program.

There are probably hundreds of pushup variations out there, but not all of them are going to give you the precious gains you desire.

You need to be conscious of what variation you’re picking to truly optimize how much muscle and strength you gain. Your choice in exercise selection will have to be made based on:

1. Use a Pushup Variation for your level of Training Experience

How long have you been training? How much muscle and strength do you already have? Or if I can phrase it in a different way, can you do a pushup?

I won’t send a beginner to do handstand pushups and one arm pushups. That’s insane.

Why? For the same reason I won’t send someone who’s more advanced to do only knee pushups, it won’t be effective.

The beginner won’t have the muscle strength to do those exercises and if they can’t do the exercises they won’t get the muscle stimulation necessary to adapt, grow and become stronger.

I’d rather start them off on easy variations, like incline pushups and knee pushups, because they’ll be able to perform these exercises, get stronger from them and, over time, progress to be able to do harder exercises.

Whereas the advanced person would already have some muscle and strength development, so they would be able to do the knee pushups and the incline pushups. But because the muscle has already adapted to a higher training stress, these variations won’t be as effective to build muscle. They’ll have to do knee pushups all day for it to have a stimulus.

I’d rather let the advanced person do harder variations that can challenge them. This can be a one armed pushup or it can be a handstand pushup. It really depends on the person, but these variations will give them the stimulus they need to build muscle from pushups.

You need to figure out where you lie on the spectrum of beginner to advanced and figure out what pushup variation to use from there.

2. Use a Pushup Variation which works your Target Muscle

A wide pushup works the chest really good, but will I use it during a shoulder workout? Probably not. If I’m trying to workout my shoulders there are many pushup variations I can use, like a pike pushup, an elevated pike pushup, a planche pushup or a handstand pushup.

There are many pushup variations and each can be used to target a muscle group from your arms to your abs. Figure out which one fits your needs and add it to your program.

Progressing on Pushups to Build Muscle

So we’ve figured out a starting point, but where do we go from there? You’ve heard of progressive overload from somewhere before haven’t you? Basically, when you train a muscle it adapts to that training stimulus by growing bigger and stronger.

So if you stimulate the muscle in the same way again, there would be no reason for it to adapt. We need to give it a stronger or different stimulus to grow. So progressive overload is basically the process of giving a muscle a stronger and stronger training stimulus over time so that it continues to grow.

In the gym we simply increase the weights we’re lifting every so often. But how can we apply progressive overload to our pushups so that we continue to see muscle growth over time?

1. Progressing to Harder Variations

If you’ve been doing ordinary pushups for a while you’re going to start to get better at them. Your muscles would have adapted and grown to the stimulus that they get from pushups. Eventually, if you want to continue building muscle you’ll have to seek out a more challenging variation.

This can be done by simply manipulating body positions. When you advance from an incline pushup to a regular pushup to a decline pushup, because you changed the position of your body and center of gravity, you’ll be forced to move more of your bodyweight.

An incline pushup at a height of 60cm or 2 feet requires you to exert a force of around 40% of your bodyweight.

An ordinary pushup requires you to exert a force of around 65% of your bodyweight.

A decline pushup at a height of 60cm or 2 feet requires you to exert a force of around 75% of your bodyweight.

So if a 200lb male advanced from incline to decline pushup he would really be increasing the weight he’s moving from 80lbs to 150lbs, therefore progressively overloading his chest muscles. You can see a similar effect when progressing from pushups to one arm pushups.

Another way to progress is by adjusting your hand positions. This changes the leverage the pushup has on specific muscles, making them have to exert a greater force.

That’s why you feel your chest more during a wide pushup than a normal pushup, because it loads the chest more.

You can adjust your hand position in different pushup variations to shift the leverage to whatever muscle you’re trying to overload.

2. Progressing by increasing Volume

This is the number of sets and reps you’re doing in a workout. Because pushups are usually a very easy exercise to perform, as you’re only lifting a fraction of your bodyweight, they aren’t as intense on your body. You can afford to increase the number of reps and sets of pushups you are performing.

If you do 10 reps today then do 12 reps tomorrow. If you did 1 set this week then do 2 sets next week. By increasing the total number of reps and sets you will be able to continue giving the muscles a greater stimulus and therefore continue stimulating muscle growth.

3. Progressing by Adding Weight

This one is a no brainer. A simple way to overload the exercise is to increase the resistance on whatever pushup variation you’re currently training. You can do this easily by using a weighted vest or using a backpack full of books or any other heavy object.

4. Progressing by Increasing Training Frequency

If you start training a muscle today it will be sore for a few days as it recovers and then it will return bigger and stronger for you to train it again. Over time your body adapts to the exercise you’re doing and you’ll find that the time you take to recover is much shorter. Why not train again?

Increasing training frequency has actually been proven to be more beneficial for increasing muscle growth. This is because when we train, muscle protein synthesis, the stuff responsible for muscle growth, is elevated for 1-2 days. After that the muscle isn’t stimulated to grow until you train it again.

So by training a muscle more often you’ll be able to get more muscle growth over time.

You can progressively implement this by slowly increasing the frequency of your pushup workouts over time as your muscles adapt to the training. This can vary from 2-3 times per week to everyday based on your workout plan and ability to recover.

5. Progressing by Increasing Training Intensity

Pushups aren’t normally considered intense workouts. That’s why we can afford to increase the training volume and frequency. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on increasing the intensity of our pushup variations in order to make the most muscle growth as possible.

We can go about intensifying our workouts in several ways.

• Adjusting form- This can help us better isolate and stimulate the muscles we’re trying to work during the exercises. Simple fixes such as adjusting the range of motion or hand position can lead to new muscle growth.
• Using Hard Variations- challenge is necessary to stimulate muscle growth.
• Perform Supersets- perform one exercise immediately after another exercise to up the intensity of your workouts and spark new growth.
• Perform Mechanical dropsets- this is where you perform one exercise for a muscle group and follow it up by another easier variation, like following a pushup with an incline pushup.
• Train to Failure- fight through the pain and do as much reps as you possibly can. It will surely stimulate muscle growth.

Putting it All Together

Can pushups build muscle? They sure can, but there isn’t any one right way to do so, only the right way for you. So you need to figure out your starting point. Don’t worry if it’s not where you want it to be. Because, as long as you continue to progress, you’ll leave it far behind you.

Start with some exercises that you can perform with good form and focus on progressing on them in some way. This can be be increasing the reps or sets you’re doing and, when that exercise becomes too easy for you, you can progress to a harder variation or try to intensify the exercise.

There are many ways to progress on your pushups, but I’ll suggest that you focus on one method at a time to see if it helps you build muscle. Then when you can’t progress any further you can try progressing in other ways. That way you’ll continue building muscle from pushups for a very long time.

I’ve already shown you where to start building muscle from pushups and I’ve shown you how to progress. Now it’s your job to start your journey and find out which of these ways works for you.

References:

Adams, G., Cheng, D., Haddad, F. and Baldwin, K., 2004. Skeletal muscle hypertrophy in response to isometric, lengthening, and shortening training bouts of equivalent duration. Journal of Applied Physiology, 96(5), pp.1613-1618.

Ebben, W., Wurm, B., VanderZanden, T., Spadavecchia, M., Durocher, J., Bickham, C. and Petushek, E., 2011. Kinetic Analysis of Several Variations of Push-Ups. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(10), pp.2891-2894.

VOSSEN, J., KRAMER, J., BURKE, D. and VOSSEN, D., 2000. Comparison of Dynamic Push-Up Training and Plyometric Push-Up Training on Upper-Body Power and Strength. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 14(3), p.248.

Masataka Majima, Emiko Horii, Hiroshi Matsuki, Hitoshi Hirata, Eiichi Genda, Load Transmission Through the Wrist in the Extended Position, The Journal of Hand Surgery, Volume 33, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 182-188, ISSN 0363-5023

Calatayud, J., Vinstrup, J., Jakobsen, M.D. et al. Importance of mind-muscle connection during progressive resistance training. Eur J Appl Physiol 116, 527–533 (2016)